


We Learn to Live With an Empty Sky

by Molliecule



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: M/M, Other, Post Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-01-17
Updated: 2013-01-17
Packaged: 2017-11-25 19:19:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/642164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Molliecule/pseuds/Molliecule
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lestrade barks out a sharp laugh.<br/>"What is it, sir?” Sally asks.<br/>Lestrade pauses, his face lighter than she'd seen it in weeks. “Sherlock did the one thing he warned me never to make the mistake of doing.”<br/>“And what was that?"<br/>“Underestimate John Watson.”<br/>-<br/>Where Sherlock watches as John step off the edge of St. Barts and does the one thing he warns people never to do. John runs as fast as he can.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Learn to Live With an Empty Sky

  
_“Falling from high places, falling through lost spaces,_  
Now that we're lonely, now that there's nowhere to go.  
Watching from both sides, these clock towers burning up,  
I lost my time here, I lost my patience with it all.”  
-Ben Howard, The Wolves

* * *

 

It is the makings of a beautiful day. The sun is already beating down on the streets of London; revealing the tight corners and worn cobblestone, storefronts and parked cabs. The morning is bright and the streets are just beginning to see life. A cab is dropping off a new businessman for an early appointment; a woman is trotting down the sidewalk on precarious heels. The most noteworthy, however, is a scrawny young boy. He is patently disheveled, his dark hair lank and dirty and his clothes old and shoes scuffed. His lazy gait slows for a moment as he turns to stare up at the dark windows of 221b Baker Street; eyes narrowing as though he is searching for something within their depts. He is disappointed. Turning, he shoots of a text from his phone then picks up speed, disappearing around the corner. Life continues across the street.

           Seconds later John wakes with his fingers twined behind his neck, tangling in the short hairs there that are bristling up to meet his palms. He shivers violently then rolls onto his back. Breathes. He is only moderately successful.  
           It takes more effort than it should to get out of bed. He is hesitant to stand, his leg aches and trembles under his weight, threatening to send him sprawling to the floor. It wouldn’t matter though, if he did. No one is here to see his weakness, but he is ashamed nonetheless. The cane is used, of course it is, as he hobbles down to the sitting room. He should really sleep in the downstairs bedroom instead of the drafty attic loft, but he can’t- can’t even think about that. Because he knows that the room will be his undoing. (He doesn’t think about the fact that Sherlock himself was his undoing).

He is waiting on that day when he will need to go into that sanctuary. Saving it. When he has reached the very bottom, the darkest hour. That one day, he will fall into the sheets that Sherlock used to wrap around himself and he will bury his face in that pillow and breathe in the scent of the detective’s dark curls.

           Baker Street hurts but the alternative hurts far more. He tried that. The small beige rooms, beige furniture, beige jumpers on a beige man. He faded so much into the background it was as though Baker Street and his life there had never even existed. There he was fresh out of the war; shoulder still raw and pink and new. So he came home.  
           He is raw and pink and an old man now. Or at least if feels as though his has aged 15 years and they have not been kind. The world has passed him by (or maybe just that he has let the world go).  
           He dresses and goes for locum work at Sarah’s surgery. She was kind to give him his job back after she heard about Sherlock, but her pitying eyes are hard for John to bear. He diagnoses colds and strep and hands out vaccines like candy. He works overtime until Sarah steps in and offers him a full time position on the condition that he goes home once and awhile. She’s joking, but her eyes are serious.  
           He works all day and then comes home to Baker Street and sleeps.  
           He survives but he does not live.  
           On occasion he meets with his therapist and she tells him the same thing. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, she claims, from watching his best friend dive off the roof and cannonball into the pavement at his feet.          
           Her foot taps against the linoleum, a sharp ticking in the silent room. She will sit there and wait for him to speak (she has before) but today she is more ill at ease. She is wringing her hands and keeps glancing to her desk. She is anxious and agitated; it drives her to speak when she would otherwise stay silent.  
           _Tap,_ “John.” _Tap, tap._  
           Black heels rap over and over, they distract him, and he’s losing himself in the sound of her feet tapping.  
           “John.”  
           “Your husband wants to divorce you.” He speaks before he can stop himself and without thinking.  
           She freezes, the beating of her food stilling for a moment. Her eyes are wide, her eyebrows scrunched in confusion. Her mouth opens and closes before she speaks. “Excuse me?”  
           Quietly, his words spaced and uncertain: John explains, his eyes trained to the floor. “You’re anxious because your husband wants a divorce. You keep twisting your ring which shows that you… doubt your marriage… but you still have it on which means you’re not done with it entirely.”  
He looks up at her, taking in all of her and somehow it comes to him, so simple. So… _obvious._  
”You’re angry at your husband- his picture is turned down on your desk and you keep glancing at it with mixed emotions… Your foot is tapping and you can’t seem to stop it, showing extreme agitation: not just a domestic, then, but a divorce.” John’s voice trails into silence as he looks up from her feet to her face and finds her eyes filled with something like pity.  
           “That’s what _he_ used to do, isn’t it.”  
           Silence. John’s jaw clenches and he ducks his head.  
           “Yeah, yeah it is,” he says, and he gets up, grabs his cane and leaves. He makes a point to go past the front desk without scheduling another appointment.

__________

           His limp only allows him to go about a block before he collapses on the front step of some government building. It hurts, his head hurts, he’s falling apart at the seams and _Sherlock won’t leave him alone._  
           A businesswoman stares down her nose as she trots past. _Lower on the food chain that she would prefer,_ he would have whispered. _Obviously: her clothing is all mockup brands; she tries to look as professional as possible but doesn’t have the funds sustain her taste of brand names. She’s looking for a promotion._ John squeezes his eyes shut and puts his hands over his ears, his head screaming.

_That man over there, John, the one in the suit. He’s having an affair with his children’s nanny. You can see the second hand stain from powdered milk on his jacket. Don’t be dull._

He curls over into himself, pressing his eye sockets into his knees.  
 _The boy with the ipod, he’s a law student, top of his class. See his book bag; it’s open at the edges and unbuckled. You can see the textbook he reads at every chance he gets. His back hurts because he carries it around everywhere. Look, John, see how he’s stooping._

_That woman there she- John, look-_

“Excuse me, sir.” A dirty young man- boy, really- grabs his shoulder (his good one, lucky) and he flinches painfully away from the touch. “Sorry, sir,” the boy apologizes quickly. “Is there anything I can get for you?” He asks, “a cab?”

           John just stares before finally nodding. “Thanks, yeah,” he finally articulates.  
           The boy bobs his head and runs out to the curb, throwing his arm out, perfect timing and a cab pulls over immediately. It is so very _Sherlock_ that it steals the breath from John’s lungs.  
           The kid, he can’t be more than 15, comes back to help him stand, folding his cane back into his right hand (good arm, luck again) and John finally really looks at him.  
           _Homeless,_ Sherlock whispers. _But he’s been squatting, it rained last night and he would still be damp if he were outside. He’s helping you without thought of restitution. Daddy issues? Good Samaritan? Sentiment?_  
(Shut up, just shut up, please.)  
           John manages to mutter his thanks to the boy then climbs into the cab and presses his forehead against the cool glass. His eyes trail after the youth who quickly pulls a phone from his pocket, fingers dancing quickly across the keys. A ghost of a frown graces the mouth of the boy for a moment before the cab turns a corner and John loses sight.

He is going crazy, bloody insane; for a second he lets himself wonder if this is how Sherlock felt all the time. As though the world was breaking apart and coming together in front of his eyes. As though all people were shallow, weak, cruel creatures and it broke his heart.

           He supposes so.  
           (No surprise that he threw himself off-)  
           John crushes that train of thought and attempts to calm his breathing. He’s concentrating on each individual breath going in and out when the cab slides to a stop outside of 221.  
           He fumbles in his wallet to grab a wad of bills and somehow counts out the proper fare for the driver before he stumbles out into the cold London air. It has started to rain (no surprise) and he is soaked in the time it takes him to hobble to the door. He barely notices, consumed by his own mind.  
           How alienating, he thinks, to watch your friend walk into dead air. How _dehumanizing_ to watch him plummet to the pavement. To see him sprawled across the ground, blood pooling in an arching halo. To have your name be the last word to come from his lips.  
           _Goodbye, John._  
 _(_ A stain on the pavement as dark as night. Except the blood would not disappear with the moon.)  
“Hello, John.” Mrs. Hudson bustles out of her flat her hands cradling a plate covered in foil. John attempts to sidestep her but she moves in front of him, laying a hand on his shoulder. “I heard the door and thought you’d appreciate some warm biscuits fresh from the oven.”  
The lump in his throat grows and he’s afraid to speak in fear of falling apart in front of her. It’s likely she sees this in his eyes because she murmurs something comforting –he can’t recall what the second it leaves her mouth- and passes him the platter. The heat against his fingers is somewhat comforting but the second he reaches the top of the stairs and is out of sight of her pitying eyes they fall from his fingers. The plate shatters with a loud crash.  
           John follows it to the floor.  
           He finds himself on the threshold of Sherlock’s bedroom. He’s not quite sure how he got there (crawled on his hands and knees like a dog, he imagines, cringing,) but he goes with it, resting his forehead against the rough wood. On his knees his mind flashes back to childhood prayers pressed against his bed frame, Harriet at his shoulder. Now he is alone and praying for someone who will never return to him.  
           There is a word he heard once in the army -Portuguese if he remembers correctly- that has no proper definition into English (or Pashto, now that he thinks of it). _Saudade_. He’s longing for something that doesn’t exist- something that will never exist- a hollowness inside, a sort of incompleteness that will never be truly filled.  
           The thought cripples him. He sinks even further into his despair. His nails are ripping and breaking against the doorframe, the wood nearly splintering under his fingertips. He is silent, though, his breaths wheezing in and out faster than they should but he does not wish to cry out, not with Mrs. Hudson just beneath him.  
           Don’t think about the stain darkening the wood where on a case Sherlock had barreled into John and bashed his own head against the wall. Don’t think of sitting in the kitchen stitching Sherlock’s forehead (beneath the hairline, so no lasting damage, at least) back together with barely a breath of thanks.  
           Don’t think about those long, narrow feet (always bare in the mornings) that passed over the place he was now kneeling. Do not think of that dark head resting on that pillow just inside the door as though he had never left.  
           Finally John breaks, his lungs ripping apart as sobs rack through him. He lets himself have this moment, though. To let the grief wash over his body like such a cruel baptism. He’s keening, a sharp, pathetic sound escaping from his lips.  
           _Get up,_ Sherlock murmurs from behind him.  
           No. The thought is strong. No, you took yourself away; you can’t take this away from me too.  
           _Please, will you do this for me?_  
           John whirls around, his fists connecting with still air. He is dizzy and his head is breaking apart and _Sherlock why are you doing this?_  
The keening grows more poignant, his sobs so hard and frequent that he can barely breathe between them. He wonders briefly if a person can grieve to death. He thinks it might be possible. Or maybe dying of pain would be too easy of a way to go.

The universe would never be that kind.

           How very cruel, how phenomenally inhumane, he thinks, to make your friend watch you die. To make him stand there as you pitch forward to the pavement; your great coat billowing out like some sick joke of a parachute. Knowing, because of course he knew, that with ending one live you irrevocably end another just as swiftly.  
           _John,_ the voice in his head grows louder, agitated, (panic?). _Think! How did it happen?_  
           “You jumped off a building,” John roars into the empty flat.  
           _Yes. You_ saw.  
           John sobs harder, his hands sliding down the door. “I saw you _die_ in front of me.”  
           _I’ve warned you the damaged of assumptions. Don’t be an idiot like all the rest, you know better than that. Keep your eyes fixed on me._  
(Oh, God, no...)  
He’s living through hell one more time. Sherlock stands far above him, no solid ground under his toes. The curve of his silhouette in sharp contrast to the vibrant blue of the sky.

_Goodbye, John._

Then falling, lungs filled, John hears screaming from somewhere (he’s not sure if the screams come from himself).

It was so easy for him to take that step, to walk out into dead air. The blood, so much blood spilling out of his broken body. He was so human, so very fragile in the end.

           _Think! Don’t get sidetracked by sentiment._ What _are you missing?_  
It’s like an itch he can’t scratch. He’s trying to recall the exact moment when he saw Sherlock hit the ground but his mind fails him. Why… why can’t he remember? Every other second is crystal clear; solid and vivid and so very real. But that instant is missing.  
           (Because Sherlock made him watch.)  
           He positioned him specifically so that John wouldn’t see him hit the ground. To prevent heartbreak? No, Sherlock would have known that it would hurt him no matter the circumstances. Scratch that. It wouldn’t even have registered, sentiment never did with him. So why, then? To trick him into believing he hit the ground?  
           _It was a trick, just a magic trick._  
           No. No. He wouldn’t dare lie like that. Not to John.  
           Except that it _was_ a lie. Because Sherlock would lie, would create this entire mirage if he had a reason. If there had been unseen danger. The prickling of hairs on the back of his neck that had been a constant warning in Afghanistan and had never settled down even in civilian life. His hair bristling up as he stared at Sherlock perched on the edge of the abyss.  
           His skin is bristling as he pulls himself to his feet. His thighs- emaciated now- quivering under the weight of him. His frame is shaking with adrenaline and what is that deep feeling in the pit of his stomach but hope.  
           He’s stumbling down the hall and into the living room. He needs to find his phone, needs to call someone. Anyone.  
           His jacket lies on the floor where he had dropped it in his delirium and he roots through it, searchingin a haze of panic. It’s gone. Not in his pockets.  
           _Fell out in the cab,_ Sherlock breathes behind him.  
           John swears, his hand rubbing a phantom pain in the back of his neck. Bloody hell. Oh God.  
           He needs to get to Barts, he thinks desperately. He needs a key and he needs to call Molly. It’s late. Oh God: it’s the middle of the night and there is no way anyone will still let him in. He’s mental. Insane and they will all know he thinks a dead man is alive.  
           Right, fine. Let them think that.  
           Sherlock’s phone is sitting untouched on the mantelpiece where John had placed it (like an altar, he thinks, but he’s not going to tell anyone that). Now he picks it up, his thumb caressing the crack down the middle. He holds it in his palm, letting the cool plastic warm in his hand before he presses power. The screen flashes a message, a plain box filled with text, but it closes before he has the chance to see what it was about.  
           John tries not to think about the fact that this is _Sherlock’s_. That _his_ fingers used to brush over this glass screen; that he used to worship this phone as though it were his life itself.  
           He scrolls though contacts (few, Sherlock after, all didn’t have _friends)_ , finds Molly Hooper. He hesitates before he sends her a quick, factual text.

_Meet me at Barts ASAP. It’s important._

           Almost immediately she responds and it steals the breath out of John’s lungs.

_Back in London again? J  What do you need?_

           It takes him a moment to realize that she is not surprised. She is not surprised that a text came through the phone that was supposed to be buried next to Sherlock (Mycroft had owed him, and John just wanted the phone). She is not surprised that a dead man is walking around London.  
He is on the floor, sinking back against the wall. His stomach is aching with betrayal. Because Molly _knew_ and he didn’t. Because Sherlock trusted _Molly_ and not his own best friend.  
           It is with shaking fingers that he manages to type a reply.

_Nothing. I just need in. Meet me in the morgue._

           Coat. Shoes. It is only on an afterthought that he ducks into the bathroom to wash the saltwater off his cheeks. The mirror only makes things worse. His eyes are dull and ringed with red and black circles, his face pasty and pale, his cheekbones as gaunt as Sherlock’s when John first met him.

The symptoms of loneliness: of being so isolated in a city so full of life.

Perhaps, he thinks, this is how Sherlock has lived all along.

            

___________

          

           John is sitting with his back to the door when Molly enters the morgue so he only hears her gasp before glass shatters and a shriek rings out across the lab. He turns to see blood (not Sherlock, not Sherlock, it’s only Molly’s hand) dripping out of a long cut down the center of her palm.  
           “John? John?” Molly is asking, eyes blown wide. “John, what are you doing here?”  
           He pauses in rummaging through the first aid kit (conveniently located: they _are_ in a hospital) to look hard at her. She seems to crumple under his gaze and doesn’t say another word until her hand is bandaged and John takes a step back.  
           “Molly,” he says quietly. “I _know_.”  
           She breathes very, very quietly. “Sherlock.”  
           “I need to go to the roof.”

____________

            
           The sky is dark with the threat of storm and John thinks that this must be his salvation. If the sky had been as vibrantly blue as- that- day, he wouldn’t have been able to cope. It would have been as though his strings had been cut, a crippled puppet. He would have tumbled to his knees, curling around himself. He would have never gotten up again.  
           John takes a step forward, and then another. A rumble of thunder rolls from within the sky as he moves and John can feel the static of the encroaching storm beneath his skin. He walks to the edge, stepping up onto the ledge, leaving Molly standing alone.  
           He looks across the rooftop and up at the sky before he can bring himself to turn his eyes to the ground below him. Another rumble breaks from the sky and John feels a drop of something wet on his cheek.  
           He’s not sure if the wetness is from him or the brewing clouds.  
           His skin feels alive as he looks down to the concrete below him. His heart is thumping in his chest and it is the saddest thing he as ever felt, being alive.  
           He considers jumping.  
           It would be so easy to step out over the ledge. To drop. To fly before it all would end with his skull splitting against the pavement.  
           Molly coughs behind him but he ignores her. Silently he appreciates that he is not alone on this roof, but he has no desire to face the pity in her deep brown eyes. The shame in his gut is enough to topple him.  
           Ha. Probably not good to think about toppling while leaning out over the side of St Barts. He knows that he has gone from nearly suicidal to clear headed within seconds. He is bipolar in the very worst way. Grieving or… dying. He is in a constant swing between the two, each eating him alive.  
           Best get down, then.  
           And he does, he steps away from the edge, the deep end, eternal silence, whatever you will. He looks down at the pavement. It’s probably only in his head that he can still see the blood.  
    _An illusion, don’t be sentimental._  
    John's phone goes off in his pocket, the vibrations sharp against his thigh.  
    "Hello?"  
    John turns to look back at Molly. She gives him a meaningful look (pity) and disappears down the access stairwell without a word.  
    "John, I have information I believe it would benefit you to hear," A nasally voice answers him, irritatingly posh and refined. The deepness, apparently a familial trait; one that sends stabs on betrayal- from both brothers- shooting through his stomach.  
    "Where is Sherlock?"  
    "Not unbeknownst to me." Mycroft replies without pause. "However," he continues. "You of all people must know that he would not allow you to join him if he had any say in the matter. I suppose you have deduced the reason for his fall."  
    "No."  
    Mycroft pauses and it gives John a sort of vindictive satisfaction to know that he was the reason for the Holmes' silence.  
    A breath, then, "John?"  
    Pause.  
    "Surely you know his reasons."  
    John doesn't want to hear any of this. He wants to make Sherlock pay for what he has done, he wants to know that that complicated mind is safe and protected. He wants to pummel him, he wants to draw him up into his arms and just prove to himself that they are both alive.  
     "I don't prescribe to understand the mind of a madman."  
    "You have understood Sherlock in the past. Seen sentiment where not even he has seen sentiment in himself. Look, John, you know he left you-"  
    John's breath hitches in his throat and he chokes on his words, his voice dark."You don't say."    
    "-John, you know he left you," Mycroft repeats calmly. "You, who have always been the only one who really mattered in his eyes. The one who made the breach between him and the real world. You, who have made him more human than I have ever seen him in the thirty years he has been my brother, You cannot even begin to think that he would have left you if it had not been absolutely vital to your survival."  
    John is answered before he even asks, and Mycroft’s voice sends him reeling. "Snipers. Trained on you, Mrs. Hudson, and DI Lestrade."  
    "No," John is saying. "No, no, no."  
    "Do you know what Moriarty told him," Mycroft's voice rises by only the faintest of tones. " _Your friends will die if you don't._ "  
    No, no, no, no.  
    "He could have told me," John breathes.  
    "He could have." Mycroft agrees. "But he chose your safety."  
    "No. He chose to keep me in the dark. I could have come with! I would have given up my life!"  
    "And he did."  
    John is floored.  
    He is fighting a losing battle with his knees to stay upright but somehow -he doesn't know how- he manages to keep on his feet. The sky is grey and there is no sun, no real sky, only haze and he thinks that that is how he feels. Like he is surrounded by hazy vapor, the lies, obscuring the beauty of London. He is struck by a desire to rip open the sky. He would do anything, defy nature, just to see the sun.  
    "Help me get back to him."  
    Mycroft pauses again, the silence hanging tensely at John's ear. "My brother will do his best to evade you, he will disappear and even I will not know of his whereabouts. He will not risk your safety under any circumstances."  
    "What if I gave him no choice but to let me stay with him? What if I made it impossible for myself to come home?"  
    "Continue…"  
     "What if I left my life here- be honest, I have nothing left to lose- and I went with him?" John is filled with hope, growing deep in his stomach and spreading outward. He takes a step forward, back onto the ledge of the roof.

“Mycroft.... what if I killed myself.”

    _John... John, please...._

 

* * *

  
_“There are wolves in the next room waiting_  
 _With heads bent low, thrust out, breathing_  
 _At nothing in the dark; between them and me_  
 _…_  
 _I have brooded on angels and archfiends_  
 _But no man has ever sat where the next room's_  
 _Crowded with wolves, and for the honor of man_  
 _I affirm that never have I before.”_  
 _…_  
Allen Tate

**Author's Note:**

> I'm in need of a beta so if anyone is willing to give it a stab, let me know, Brits and Americans welcome.  
> This is going to be a long work, probably around 10 or 12 chapters, and I'd like to have someone to help plan some minor plot details with as well so if you're interested let me know about that too.  
> All criticism is welcome.


End file.
